As enrollment at the Westwood campus explodes, UCLA officials are scrambling for ways to further improve and expand their facilities to accommodate the influx of students.

Among them are plans to extend the school’s seven-year Campaign UCLA fund-raising drive and petition the state for more money for new construction.

UCLA has the highest student enrollment of any University of California campus and the smallest land area of any of the campuses.

UCLA freshman enrollment in fall 2001 was capped earlier this month at about 4,200 students, up 13.4 percent from 1995.

The school is expected to grow by about 4,000 more full-time students over the next 10 years in what the UC system calls “Tidal Wave II.” The UC Board of Regents’ decision last week to repeal affirmative action policies could further boost those numbers.

“It’s possible that by having those resolutions no longer formally on the books that more underrepresented students will feel welcome and more will apply and more will take our offer of admission,” said Tom Lifka, assistant vice chancellor of student academic services at UCLA.

Before the 10-year projection of skyrocketing enrollment came out, UCLA had anticipated that no additional undergraduate housing would need to be built. Now, the school is appealing to the UC Board of Regents to approve two or three dorm-style buildings to be finished in three years that would bring about 1,500 new beds to the campus, said Wyatt Hume, executive vice chancellor for UCLA.

That’s in addition to a 2,000-unit graduate housing project already under construction on the southwest campus, he said.

UCLA already upped its highly successful $1.2 billion fund-raising campaign last year by $400 million. Now equipped with new enrollment projections, it’s going back to the drawing boards. Hume said the university is looking at possibly extending the capital campaign.

“We’re in very active consideration right now about the duration of the campaign,” said Hume, executive vice chancellor for UCLA. “I can’t say anything more. We’re considering extending it for the (enrollment) reasons and others. The campaign has gone extremely well and the amount of support has been outstanding.”

Funds for classrooms

More than 35 percent of the proceeds raised through Campaign UCLA goes toward campus improvements that are entirely separate from construction projects funded by the university’s $2 billion annual budget.

Money from both the annual budget and from Campaign UCLA is being used to pay for construction of new high-quality classrooms and offices.

But none of that money is available to pay for construction of more on-campus housing, which must be funded through bonds and student fees. And UCLA will clearly need additional student housing if enrollment projections come true.

With about 10,000 students admitted each fall, UCLA has some of the lowest admission numbers in the UC system. But its enrollment rate the portion of admitted students who actually show up to go to school at the university is about 40 percent, the second-highest in the system. That is topped only by UC Berkeley.

Further evidence of the swelling ranks of students looking to stroll UCLA’s hallways is that in-state applications to UCLA rose from 23,000 to 32,200 between 1995 and 2000.

The looming student population boom is not exactly going over well with homeowners in the area, as traffic worsens. At about 120,000 daily vehicle trips, UCLA generates more traffic than any other single entity in Southern California, said Alvin Milder, chairman of UCLA Watch, a coalition of homeowner organizations and neighbors of UCLA.

“The traffic is overwhelming, and it’s ruining the neighborhoods,” he said.

UCLA has not been averse to moving some operations off its 419-acre campus, either. Recently, the university built faculty housing near the Los Angeles International Airport and moved some office support operations into an office building in Westwood Village, Hume said.

Off-campus idea nixed

And five or six years ago, UCLA was toying with the idea of acquiring land near California State University’s Camarillo campus. But the desire to keep activities on campus was greater than the desire for more land, he said.

“We feel there are great advantages to keeping people closer together,” Hume said. “One of the great strengths is to work across the traditional disciplines. When you start developing satellite campuses, you lose that.”

So, the school has been creative. Instead of blacktop parking, the school constructed above- and below-ground parking garages. Instead of building on unused land, UCLA has renovated or demolished existing buildings to construct new ones that could house a larger number of functions.

To lower the student population, UCLA is looking at ways to move students through to graduation more quickly, Lifka said.

Through financial aid and lower fees, the school is encouraging students to take summer classes. It also is restructuring the unit value of classes, so students do not limit their coursework around one difficult class with a disproportionately low credit value, he said. And it has extended its fare-free BruinGo bus pass program with Santa Monica Bus Lines to decrease traffic congestion.

One neighborhood group president said that UCLA is doing the best it can, given unfair demands from the UC system and the state to accept so many students.

“It’s very unfair that the regents and state Legislature put this on the back of UCLA, which is already a very dense campus,” said Laura Lake, president of the Friends of Westwood. “I don’t fault UCLA. But I do fault the Legislature for not distributing this burden more equally. We’re a built-up campus in a built-up city.”